Thursday, January 22, 2015

At 42 years, measured by standard
reproductive age (ages 15-44), Roe v.
Wade is reaching an advanced age. But rather than this anniversary marking advances
sufficient to end the need to fight for this most basic right – the right to
decide whether, when, and how to bear and parent children – it sometimes feels
closer to marking the end of Roe.

Women comprise more than half of the
U.S. population. Over 99 percent of women of reproductive age who have ever had
sexual intercourse have used at least one contraceptive method. One in three
women will have an abortion in her lifetime. Simply put, a full range of
reproductive health care is an essential part of primary care for women.

Yet increasingly, women’s access to reproductive health care
has been eroded by restrictions. During the 2014 state legislative session
alone, state lawmakers introduced 341 provisions aimed
at restricting access to abortion. Earlier this month, during the first few
days of session for the current Congress, lawmakers introduced five different bills restricting abortions,
including a bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks that was scheduled to be voted
on today. (House Republicans scrapped that vote
yesterday evening, but will instead vote on a bill that restricts taxpayer
funding of abortion, which disproportionately impacts low-income women.)

Currently, according to the
Guttmacher Institute, 87 percent of U.S.
counties do not have an abortion provider, and 35 percent of women aged 15–44
live in those counties. In Washington State, 64 percent of counties
had no abortion clinic (2011
data), and from 2008 to 2011, Washington experienced a 10 percent decline in
overall providers (from 50 to 45). Nonhospital providers estimated in 2005 that nearly two in 10 women traveled 50–100
miles to access abortion services, and almost one in 10 traveled more than 100
miles.

And the restrictions on reproductive
health care access are not limited to abortion care. It’s already the case that
in many communities, independent clinics have had to fill the gap in
comprehensive reproductive services for women. For example, while Planned
Parenthood is best known for providing abortion services, those account for
about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activities, which include contraception
(35 percent), STD testing (also 35 percent), and cancer screening and
prevention (16 percent).

Further accelerating the segregation of women’s
health care from “general” health care is the rise in mergers between religious
and secular hospital systems. Because Catholic policy forbids providing certain
services including contraceptive counseling and care, sterilization, as well as
abortions, access to comprehensive reproductive care often falls victim to
corporate dealmaking.

Instead of further restricting access to basic
reproductive health care, lawmakers should be working to increase access. As the President stated
earlier this week in his State of the Union address, surely we can agree it's a
good thing that unintended pregnancies and abortions are nearing all-time lows,
and that every woman should have access to the health care she needs.

In her novel A
Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood famously depicted a dystopia in which
women were valued and segregated based on their reproductive capacity. Maybe we aren’t quite there yet, but only through
proactively expanding protections can we reverse this trend toward a separate
and unequal health care system for women. Washington can start with
ensuring that every woman has access to coverage for contraception and abortion
care, regardless of who her employer is, and ensuring that hospital systems
can’t restrict providers from providing the care their patients need. Equity
demands no less.

Janet
Chung is Legal and Legislative Counsel at Legal Voice, based in Seattle,
Washington, where she works to advance reproductive and economic justice for
women through advocacy, litigation, and legal rights education. She is a Ford
Foundation Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project.

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